Category — Cool Bathrooms and Technology

Mrs. ICBE and I went out for lunch to En Fuego in Del Mar recently. As is my custom, before eating I went to the bathroom. One there, I was presented with the following sight:

Did my eyes deceive me, or was this indeed a dual-flush toilet in the flesh? (I’ve only seen one once before) Well the next thing my eyes saw was this:

Curiously, I held down the right button and the toilet did indeed flush. Next, I held down the left button.

Nothing.

Apparently En Fuego managed to get their holds on a dual-flush toilet, but didn’t bother connecting the second button. Newsflash, dual-button is not the same thing as dual-flush!

On a side note, they also had a window in the bathroom opening into the restaurant! You could only see it from the sink, but still – creepy!

As a man, a middle-of-the-night-in-the-dark pee session usually means one of three things:

1. You pee sitting down
2. You turn a light on and blind yourself for a minute or two first
3. You pee all over the seat and floor

While I simply opt for #1 (no pun intended) as a simple and effective solution, not everyone may be as comfortable peeing from a seated position. Enter the Jonny Glow, stickers designed to glow in the dark all night long and illuminate the toilet enough so that a man no longer has any excuse for missing.

Jonny Glow promises to be inconspicuous during the day and glow all night long. And if it ever stops glowing they promise to replace it – free! For only $12.95, it sounds almost too good to be true. I’ve never seen anything glow for more than a couple hours after the lights went out, but I’d love to be proven wrong!

via mhh5th and Jalopnik

If you hadn’t heard, Chelsea Clinton is getting married. As the daughter of an ex President, she does things a little fancier than most of us, including renting some of the swankiest portable toilets around for her wedding. TMZ puts the total toilet rental cost at about $15,000 – ouch!

Now I’ve been in some nice portable toilets before, but I have a feeling they won’t be anything like the ones Chelsea’s guests will be enjoying.

Wells Cargo Platinum Edition

If postings have been a little sparse lately, it’s because we here at the ICBE have been spending part of our summer scouring the globe for noteworthy bathrooms. One such chance encounter occurred recently in the lovely city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In the hunt for a place for toddlers to play that wasn’t insanely busy and overcrowded (ie not the beach), we happened upon Chaldecott Park.

It was a lovely park with a lovely playground and a lovely sprayground and some positively not-at-all-lovely bathrooms. Aside from the fantastic stench, I was greeted with the following sight upon entering:

That’s right, in the year 2010 Chaldecott Park still features a bonafide trough urinal. Not only that, but the single toilet featured some rather curious signage:

DO NOT STAND ON TOILET – Thanks

As you may have expected I absolutely did not relieve myself in the trough, instead opting for the toilet pictured above. You will also be pleased to know that at no time was I even tempted to stand on the toilet, though evidently that’s a bit of a problem with the locals.

I have a confession – I don’t mind auto-dispensing soap dispensers, and I can live with auto-flush urinals. But we’ve said it before:

Auto-Flush Toilets are the Devil

Still not convinced? Check out this sign spotted in the wild by ICBE aficionado SM:

IF TOILET DOES NOT FLUSH AUTOMATICALLY,
PLEASE PRESS THE BLACK BUTTON
THANK YOU

Here’s what SM had to say:

Just let me flush it on my own in the first place, and we won’t have this issue. I can also pump my own soap.

Sing it sister!

I recently had the pleasure of going aboard the USS Midway (Wikipedia), an aircraft carrier currently serving as a museum ship in San Diego. Aside from being a generally super-cool museum, the Midway contains something that you will not be surprised was of interest to me: bathrooms.

I managed to capture this picture of what I believe to be the bathroom for some junior officers – please don’t mind the “artistic” angle, I had to reach over and around a sheet of plexiglass to make the shot. Overall, some fairly nice facilities for a boat not designed with luxury in mind.

Fantastic ICBE reader Andy went one step further, procuring two shots of the bathroom in the Midway’s brig.

Click for larger

Click for larger

While I certainly expected a step down in the accommodations, I didn’t expect you’d have to actually stand in the toilet to use the sink. Ouch!

Here at the ICBE, we generally restrict ourselves to terrestrial bathroom etiquette for the simple reason that not a lot of people poop in space, and nobody has yet proven the existence of pooping aliens.

Still, every once in awhile it’s nice to think about the needs of astronauts, who occasionally are going to need to bust out a Zero G poop. If you’ve ever wondered how it’s done, here’s your answer:

via mhh5th

The ridiculously hot Mrs Dr ICBE and I had a rare child-free evening this past weekend, which we decided to spend at Cirque du Soleil. If you’ve ever been to Cirque before, you have a pretty good idea of how our evening went. It was pretty much 2.5 hours of Oh my god, how are they doing that! and Please, please, please don’t fall off! and Oh yeah, I could totally do that if I was wearing better shoes.

What I did not expect however was my first (First!) ever sighting of a dual-flush toilet in the flesh porcelain. Cirque uses those super-fancy almost like actual bathrooms porta-potties, and this is what awaited me inside, on top of the toilet:

Conveniently, they even had a sign explaining everything:

We are using dual-flush toilets to reduce our water consumption.

Now I’m not a big fan of the euphemisms of “Solid” for poop and “Liquid” for pee, but I’m prepared to cut them some slack for their water conservation efforts. Nice!

It’s Friday, and it’s been a long week of incessant #1 and #2 here at the ICBE. Ever feel like you go pee, and then a couple hours later you just have to go pee again? Makes me wonder what the point is sometimes, but I digress. Things have been building up in the inbox, and it’s time to shed some weight, starting with sensible discussion over at The Blue. Seriously though, if the people over at Metafilter cannot discuss a topic sensibly, then that topic cannot be discussed sensibly.

1) The Sexual Politics of Toilets

All that work, and she doesn’t even mention transgender public restroom facilities?

-zarq

2) Animal, Biodegradable and Compost Toilets

Sh_ttiest FPP we’ve seen in a long time.

-cenoxo (pun intended!)

3) Pants Pankuro: Toilet training in Japan

As somebody who makes a living by (among other things) toilet training tiny little Japanese children, I have seen Pants Pankuro on many, many diapers but never knew his name until this post. Thanks!

-emmling

Dear God No!!!

At There, I Fixed It, via Marc at Home Fixated